By far the best stock line I’ve heard from a professional walk-around magician is a response to offers from spectators who offer to buy her a drink as a sign of appreciation for her work. That line is “I’m afraid the only drink I can accept is one I can fold up into my pocket and take home with me.”
One day I hope that I will be an audience member in a show who makes such an offer, receives this line, and can immediately hand them a Capri Sun.
Of course the line is a request for tips, something which to those of us who work for a fixed wage kind of balk at. Indeed the general assumption of the corporate classes is that anyone who is offering a service must have been offered payment upfront or they wouldn’t be doing it in the first place, as such asking for recompense after the fact seems at best naive and at worse downright cheeky. I did a busking course a few years ago and it really did feel kind of dirty to ask for money after the show, like I’d somehow conned people into watching something they thought was free and then delivered a bill.
I was no better than a hotel minibar.
On an intellectual level, I know this is nonsense, people deserve to be compensated for their labour, and asking at the end allows people to decide the value provided with full experience of the product. There’s just something visceral about it though, a idea that runs so deep in the psyche of the capitalist wage slave mindset that it affects us on an emotional gut level.
The same magician who told me the line about folding up drinks also had some advice for performing bill in lemon, which was to leave returned banknotes as messy as possible. Covered in bits of lemon sticky juices, to make the audience less willing to take them home and more likely to just hand them over.
Sadly I can’t think of a pay to replicate that in a post cash society but as a magical purist, who is in it for the art, we need to think about how we can perform bill in lemon at all. Come on a journey with me.
The danger is already present. starting in Haiti in 1982, polymer banknotes began their spread, with the UK banknote denomination, the £50, being polymerised in 2021. There are now 26 countries using these things. Soon the paper £50s will be phased out and paper banknotes will be no more in my homeland. Every method which involves ripping a piece off a banknote to prove that it is part of the note found in an impossible location is over. If you rely on that method, you’re back to forced playing cards.
Oh the indignity.
Sure, you could upgrade to a technique which allows use of a signed bill – still possible with polymer notes (though fascinatingly I’ve never encountered one with ink on it yet) but as we know this is merely a stop gap.
Valuable Paper
But lets rewind a little, there are three things about paper money which I want to talk about, and the first one I already hinted at in my earlier post Die For King Money, routines where the currency is intended to be kept as a gift such as Jay Sankey’s Spiral or Hannibal’s Bookends, specifically for countries where the smallest denomination of banknote in a country decides how likely the recipient is to keep it as a souvenir or try to spend it. There are many options of course. When Hannibal performs bookends he actually uses his own dollar bills (because as mentioned already, dollars are not worth very much) ensuring the ones he uses are crisp and easy to fold.
If you’re going to use your own money it could be any currency at all.
100 Iranian Rial is, at the time of writing, the cheapest banknote in the world, valued at approximately 0.18p. Not zero pounds and eighteen pence, nought point one eight pence. Five and a half of these notes is worth a penny. Of course, getting these in your hand in the UK (or anywhere in the western world) would be quite the chore, but there are other countries with runaway inflation and better access for tourists and there are also other options.
One other option for valuable paper is lottery tickets. UK Lottery tickets used to cost £1, but they’re currently £2 (and £2.50 for the Euromillions lottery) so this option is rapidly disappearing as an “every table” kind of trick, unless you charge ridiculous amounts for your presence at an event.
If you want to abandon any concept of value at all, you can produce something a little more novel, and print your own banknotes. Not forgeries, I should rapidly add for my own legal defence, but fun bucks. Monopoly money, or a thematically similar idea which is legally distinct from anything owned by Hasbro.
I used to own a signed hundred billion dollar bill from the bank of hell. It was mass produced as a promotional item for a book by Andrew Harman¹. My point being that with a little ingenuity you could probably craft a banknote which has some thematic weight to it, making it’s final impossible setting an even better souvenir than a real note.
This is the route I usually take, as I have my own gaff designs for monopoly style bills, but that removes a few key things that banknotes have in their favour, some of which it is unlikely we will ever get back.
Useful Paper
Borrowed notes, so versatile. The audience brings them to the gig, you don’t have to carry a thing. But there are other advantages. A banknote can be transported enormous distances on live TV, and this was done many years ago. How did they know it was the same note? Matching serial numbers. Whilst arguably you could try to achieve something similar with other numerically identifiable pieces of paper (Lottery tickets, bus tickets, store receipts) the fact is some things just aren’t going to work anymore.
Already there are bank night routines where the winning envelope contains not cash but a voucher of some sort. A magician’s IOU if you will. Gone will be the routines where a spectators £20 is accidentally burned or mutilated in some way. In the short term I guess these could be reworked to use a credit card but I can foresee a time soon when people will pay for everything using an NFC² application on their phone.
My recommendation, bizarre though it might be, is to develop your routines to work with what I will call Ambient Paper. Ambient paper is the flyers and special offer leaflets you find in restaurants. It’s the 3 fold brochures for local attractions in hotel lobbies. If you have to perform in a place where nothing of the sort exists, the in your own promotional flyers and leave a stack there during your performance to source them from. These will almost certainly be too large in an of themselves to use in the place of banknotes, but that gives you a reason to fold one in half and tear it down to size, at which point you have an identifying tear of the type used in banknote routines before the advent of polymer notes.
With a little careful planning you could even apply banknote methods to paper napkins, although it may be worth getting them signed.
This All Sounds Thoroughly Inorganic
So to finish off, let me be uncharacteristically generous and present a script to wrap around any borrowed banknote trick to turn it into a signed flyer you grabbed off the side table trick.
Approach table “Hello everyone, I’m going to be your magician for tonight and- oh my god.”
Focus all your attention on one spectator.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to cause a fuss but I am such a huge fan of your work. Before we kick off can I get our autograph?”
Pat down your pockets, look around for some paper, grab a flyer, fold it in half, and hand it, with a pen, to your mark.
“This is so cool. No one is going to believe that I met you.”
Take the paper back but DO NOT LOOK AT IT YET.
“I suppose I should do a magic trick. Kind of weird with you watching me instead of the other way round.”
Perform Misled or bill in lemon or whatever. The reason you folded the flyer in half before is so that at this point you can tear it to size (if needed) without damaging the signature. After the trick, open up the paper and look at their name for the first time.
“I can’t wait to see their faces when I tell my buddies at the circle that I did a show for… Wait a minute. You’re not J.K. Simmons³! Oh wow this is embarrassing. I’m so sorry, madam⁴. Here, you can keep this, let me make it up to you.”
And thats when you do your next trick.
Of course you can choose to bookend the performance by vanishing the flyer at the start and bringing it back at the end. The important thing is that until that final revelation you have to maintain the nervous teenage energy of performing for a star.
¹ It was signed by the author, not the devil. Although who’s to say they’re not one and the same? There’s a fair amount of blasphemy in his bibliography. These are matters for the church to argue over. I just recommend that you read It Came From On High.
² Note that I said NFC (Near Field Communication) the super short range radio frequency used for contactless payments. I did not say NFT (Non Fungible Tokens) an extension of cryptocurrencies which I already touched upon in a previous post. Somehow NFTs manage to be even worse though. I am desperately trying to restrain myself from writing another entry just about these things.
³ It is vitally important for you to choose a celebrity who looks absolutely nothing like the person you are performing for. This does raise the question of what to do if you encounter an actual celebrity in performance. This has never happened to me (although I have ended up sitting adjacent to Michael Palin on a train) but if it did I would endeavour to identify them as the wrong celebrity, and pretend I had never heard of the actual celebrity. This might seem tremendously rude, but one day it will almost certainly end up as one of their anecdotes on a chat show interview.
⁴ I would hope it goes without saying, but I try not to gender my audience at all in performance. I added this here as a humorous way of hinting that the fictional person I chose for this gambit in the example looks nothing at all like J.K. Simmons.